美国文学名词解释

Calvinism (sometimes called the Reformed tradition, the Reformed faith, or Reformed theology) is a theological system and an approach to the Christian life that emphasizes the rule of God over all things. It bears the name of the French reformer John Calvin because of his prominent influence on it. The system is best known for its doctrines of predestination and total depravity.

Romanticism occurred and developed in Europe and America at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries under the historical background of the Industrial Revolution around 1760 and the French Revolution (1789 –1799). The term “Romantic”was first used by the German critic Friedrich Schlegel (1772 –1829) at the beginning of the 19th century. Romanticism marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the Neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the past.

Characteristics:

(1) Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.

(2) Feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.

(3) They stressed the close relationship between man and nature.

(4) They emphasized individualism, placing the individual at the center of life and art.

(5) They affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted each person to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.

(6) They cherished strong interest in the past, especially the medieval.

(7) They were attracted by the wild, the irregular, the remote, the mysterious, and the strange. Gothic

(8) Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyrics, sentimental comedy, novels, gothic romance, sonnet, and critical essays.

Dark Romantics present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. For these Dark Romantics, the natural world is dark, decaying, and mysterious; when it does reveal truth to man, its revelations are evil and hellish. Finally, whereas Transcendentalists advocate social reform when appropriate, works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts to make changes for the better. American writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville are the major Dark Romantic authors

Transcendentalism:This movement refers to the New England literary movement which flourished from 1835 to 1860. It started with the meetings of a small group of eminent writers and scholars who came together in a town called Concord to discuss the new thought of the time. Though they held different opinions about many issues, they seemed to generally agree that within the nature of man there was an intuitive and personal revelation that can transcend human experience. They became known as the Transcendental Club. Members of the Club included Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 –1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817 –1862), Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As the movement developed, it sponsored two important activities: the publication of a magazine The Dial and the organization of Brook Farm. It had a considerable influence on American art and literature. Key statements of its doctrine include Emerson’s nature, The American Scholar, the Divinity School Address, and Self-Reliance and also Thoreau’s Walden.

1.It stressed the power of intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by means of five senses and from the inner world by intuition. But the things they learned from within were truer than the things they learned from without, and transcend them. It held that everyone had access to a source of knowledge that transcend everyday experiences. Intuition was the inner light.

2. as romantic idealism, it placed spirit first and matter second. It believed that both spirit and matter were real but that the reality of spirit was greater than that of matter. Spirit transcend reality.

3. it took nature as symbolic of God. All things in nature were symbols of god’s presnece. Nature was alive. Everything in the universe was viewed as an expression of the divine spirit. Therefore, nature could exercise a healthy and restorative influence on human mind. People should come close to nature for instructions.

4. 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. People should depend on themselves for spiritual perfection. With the innate goodness of humanity, it held that the individual soul could reach God without the help of churches or clergy.

5. Emerson envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”. The “Oversoul”was all pervading unitary spiritual power of goodness, omnipresent and omnipotent, from which all things came and of which everyone was a part. Generally, the Oversoul was a single essence, and since all people derived their beings from the same source, the seeming diversity and clash of human interests was only superficial, and all people were in reality striving toward the same ends by difference paths.

6. it held that commerce was degrading and that a life spent in business was a wasted life. Humanity could be much better off if they paid less attention to the mateiral world in which they lvied.

Realism was originated in France, a literary doctrine that called for “reality and truth”in the depiction of ordinary life. It soon spread to other countries in Europe. Zola, Flaubert, Balzac, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were among the outstanding representatives.

1. verisimitude of detail derived from observation;

2. a reliance on the representative in plot, setting and character;

3. an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience;

4. Focus on the commonness of lives of the common people;

5. interest in the problems of the individual conscience in conflict with social institution.

Local color fiction“exploits the speech, dress, mannerism, habits of thought, and topography peculiar to a certain region. Of course, all fiction has a locale, but local writing exists primarily for the portrayal of the people and life of a geographical setting.”Local color fiction has “such a quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else that a native.”(Texture refers to the elements which characterize a local culture such as speech, customs dress etc. Background covers physical setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which condition human thought and behavior.)

Local color writing was a form of regionalism popular after the Civil War. Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and early 1870s. At that time, the

westward expansion was still going on, and people realized marked differences in different parts of their identity and seek understanding and recognition by showing their local color. What was more, after the civil war, a lot of magazines appeared and provided opportunities for local colorists to write about their parts of the United States. The representative authors were Mark Twain, Hamlin Garland, Francis Bret Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

1.Local color fiction presents a locale which is distinguished from the outside world. Local colorists concern themselves with portraying and interpreting the local character of their particular region.

2.Local color fiction is marked by an attempt at accurate dialect reporting, a tendency toward the use of eccentrics as characters, and the use of sentimental pathos.

3. local color fiction glorifies the past. The writers are nostalgic about the past, about the old, agrarian way of life that was passing away.

4. Local color fiction stresses the influence of setting on character. The local color writers set out with a thesis that in each region of the country, the setting is different, and therefore the people behave differently. They have different qualities.

Naturalism is a new and harsher realism. It develops on the basis of realism but goes a step further in portraying social reality. Under the influence of Charles Darwin’s evolution theory and Herbert Spencer’s application of Darwin’s theory in the social relations, naturalists are especially concerned with how human beings strive to find meaning in their experiences, how people fight against environment and other external forces, and what elements make people who and what they are.

Thematically, naturalistic writers write detailed descriptions of the lives of the lower class. They are interested in finding out how men and women are overwhelmed by the forces of environment and by the forces of heredity. The gloomy and pessimistic atmosphere in many naturalistic writings makes naturalism more naked and wicked than realism when representing social reality. Naturalists hold that since man is governed by his instincts and desires, he has no free will to control his fate. So naturalist writers do not attempt to make moral judgments.

The novel of manners is a literary genre that deals with aspects of behavior, language, customs and values characteristic of a particular class of people in a specific historical context. The genre emerged during the final decades of the 18th century. The novel of manners often shows a conflict between individual aspirations or desires and the accepted social codes of behavior. There is a vital relationship between manners, social behavior and character. Physical appearances are overall less emphasized while manners and social behavior remain the particular interests in the novel. The idea of manners assumes not only a social significance, as it is applied today, but a moral one as well, which preceded the social context in which it was used. What connects the two is the idea of "pleasing". Characters in the novels are not always morally and socially obliging to each other, however, but there is differentiation between the upstanding hero or heroine and the socially less acceptable characters. The different degrees of how the characters uphold the standard level of social etiquette is what usually dominates the plot of the novel.

Modernism is an omnibus(综合的;包括多项的) term for a number of tendencies in the arts

which were prominent in the first half of the 20th c.;

In English literature it is particularly associated with the writings of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, F. M. Ford and Joseph Conrad.

1.marked by a persistent experimentalism

2.rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose

3.in favor of stream-of-consciousness presentation of personality

4.a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle.

Stream of Consciousness was a literary technique in which a character's thoughts are presented in the confusing, jumbled, and inconsequential manner of real life without any clarification by the author. It's best known writers are Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

Stream of consciousness(意识流)(or interior monologue);In literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow,tracing as they do a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.famous writers to employ this technique in the english language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.

The Lost Generations:This is a term applied to the disillusioned intellectuals of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values, but could replace them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. They became expatriates, living in European cities such as London and Paris, standing aside and writing about what they saw –the failures of the American society. They believed that the American bourgeois society was hypocritical, vulgar and crude, concerning only with making money. It was a society where individual thought and individual expression were crushed. These intellectuals include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson etc. The term came from Gertrude Stein’s comment on Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.”

Harlem Renaissance was a term to describe the revival of the literary and artistic achievement in the 1920s by Afro-American writers. The writers who were associated with Harlem Renaissance include Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, James Weldon Johnson, and Marcus Garvey. Their artistic endeavor paved the way to the later black writers, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.

Modernism:

Modernism was an international literary and artistic movement which originated in Europe and

later spread to other parts of the world. It gained expression in many related fields of art, such as painting (Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, George Braque, Marcel Duchamp and other painters associated with Dadaism), music (Igor Stravinsky), fiction (James Joyce, Virginia Woolfe, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann) and poetry (William Butler Yeats)

American literature and art at the beginning of 20th century were in this trend. Writers, artists and architects adopted “a variety of avant-guarde doctrines so revolutionary as to exhaust the traditional vocabulary of the arts and require the creation of new descriptive terms: futurism, expressionism, post-modernism, Dadaism, imagism and surrealism. By 1920s, modernism became part of everyday vocabulary of the Americans.

Many modernistic writers believe that “the previously sustaining structures of human life … had been either destroyed or shown up as falsehood or fantasies.” The subject matter of a modernistic writing often became the work itself since the writer was obsessed with the interrelation between literature and life. Fragments and framentation dominated human experience as well as artistic writing. No matter what modernistic techniques were employed, the search for meaning –the meaning of life, the meaning of literature – remained the ultimate purpose of many modernistic writers.

Imagism:

The Imagism Movement began in London and later spread to the US. It flourished from 1909 to 1917. Poetry, a magazine of verse, founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, became the chief carrier of Imagist poems. It provided a channel for young poets to publish their experimental verses.

Imagism underwent three major phases in its development.

1. 1908 – 1909

An Englsihman, T.E Hulme, founded a Poet’s Club in 1908, which met in Soho every Wednesday evening to discuss poetry. He believed that the most effective means to express the momentary impression is through “the use of one dominant image”. The image must enable one “to dwell and linger upon a point of excitement, to achieve the impossible and convert a point into a line.

2. 1912 – 1914

Ezra Pound took over the movement. He defined image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” In 1912, he with some other poets published a collection of poems, entitled Des Imagistes. It is regarded as the manifeto of Imagism. In included three principles.

a.Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective;

b.To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;

c.As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in the sequence of a

metronome.

3. 1914 – 1917

Amy Lowell took over the movement and developed it into “Amygism.”In 1915 -17, three volumns of some Imagist Poets came out, containing six principles of poetic composition.

An outstanding representative of Imagist poems is Ezra Pound’s ine poem, “In a Station of the Metro”, William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelburrow”’ and Amy Lowell’s “Wind and Silver”, etc.

1920s

1.Industrialization and urbanization:

2.Women’s Liberation

3.Disillusionment

The most notable writers of the time:

Sinclair Lewis: Main Street (1920)

Sherwood Anderson Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Death in the Woods (1933)

Earnest Heminway:

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)

T.S. Eliot: The Wasteland (1922)

1930s

1.The Great Depression

2.The New Deal

The most notable writers of the time:

John Steinbeck(1902 – 1968): Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

John Dos Passos (1896 – 1970): U. S. A.(triology 1939 – 1936)

William Faulkner (1897 -1962): The Sound and Fury

Richard Wright (1908 – 1960): Native Son (1940)

Eugene O’Neill (1888 – 1953)

Dada or Dadaism（达达主义):a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.

a group of artists assembled in Zürich in 1916, wanting a name for their new movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child's word for hobby-horse.

Anti-war

Reject reason and logic

embrace chaos and irrationality

Anti-art

Hope to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics

Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who generally held that the focus of philosophical thought should be to deal with the conditions of existence of the individual person and their emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts. The early 19th century philosopher S?ren Kierkegaard(克尔凯郭尔) , posthumously regarded as the father of existentialism, maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving their own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.

Expressionism （表现主义): a cultural movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century.

Expressionism emerged as an 'avant-garde movement' in poetry and painting before the First

World War

its popularity peak in Berlin, during the 1920s.

Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms, including: painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music.

1.bold colours, distorted forms, two-dimensional, without perspective

2.present the world under an utterly subjective perspective

3.violently distorting it to obtain an emotional effect and vividly transmit personal moods and ideas.

4.Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of "being alive"and emotional experience rather than physical reality.

multiple points of view（多视角）：Multiple Point of View: It is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.

Confessional poetry ：Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and William De Witt Snodgrass have all been called 'Confessional Poets'. As fresh and different as the work of these poets appeared at the time, it is also true that several poets prominent in the canon of Western literature, perhaps most notably Sextus Propertius and Petrarch, could easily share the label of "confessional" with the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties.

A J azz age(爵士时代):The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between world war I and world war II. Particularly in north America. With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz Age”.

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.2> The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.3> the major beat writings are Allen Ginsberg’s howl.Howl became the manifesto of The Beat Generation

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

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.

美国文学史及选读复习重点

Captain John Smith (first American writer). Anne Bradstreet；The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America （colonists living） Edward Taylor(the best puritan poet) John Cotton ”the Patriarch of New England” teacher spiritual leader Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography Poor Richard’s Almanack Thomas Jefferson： Political Career Thoughts The Declaration of Independence we hold truth to be self-evidence Philip Freneau“Father of American Poetry” The Wild Honey Suckle American Romanticism optimism and hope Nationalism Washington Irving“Father of American Literature short story”The first “Pure Writer” A History of New York The Sketch Book marked the beginning of American Romanticism! “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”Rip Van Winkle James Fenimore Cooper Father of American sea and frontier novels Leather stocking Tales The Last of the Mohicans The Pioneers The Prairie The Pathfinder The Deerslayer Edgar Allan Poe father of detective story and horror fiction Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque “MS. Found in a Bottle” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” “The Fall of the House of Usher”“The Masque of the Red Death”“The

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