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 God.They 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 church.On 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.

3. Romanticism浪漫主义: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18thcentury 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 19thcentury 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.

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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 through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and

skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。 9. Modernism现代主义：It was a complex and diverse（复杂多样的） international movement in all the creative arts（创造性艺术），originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided（出现） the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of

many facets （方面）， such as symbolism，surrealism（超现实主义）， cubism（立体主义），expressionism，futurism （未来主义），ect

10. Imagism意象派: It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the

creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement were Ezra